Ficaia

O dearer than the daylight to thy sister, wilt thou waste, sad and alone, all thy length of youth, and know not the sweetness of motherhood, nor love’s bounty? Deemest thou the ashes care for that, or the ghost within the tomb?
- Virgil, Aeneid, IV (tr. John William Mackail)
- [1] [2]; "the ghost within the tomb"

Generally young, shallow-brained fellows, proud of their uniform, treating the diggers overbearingly, and bringing down invectives upon the Government through its servants.
- Mrs Andrew Campbell, wife of the Ballarat police magistrate; Lawrence L. Sharkey, Australia Marches On (Sydney: New South Wales Legal Rights Committee, 1942), p. 282

But with all its golden advantages, Australia has yet greater for the emigrant who prefers the comforts and decencies of life to bartering his soul for gold. In Australia, as elsewhere, Mammon carries his curse with him, and his worshippers must partake of it. Drunkenness, debauchery, crime, and immorality, in every shape, are the characteristics of such a society as is now gathering in the gold districts. There are thousands of respectable families in England whose interest it would be to emigrate, but who would not encounter such a condition for all the gold Australia contains.
- George Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge, 1853), p. 2

Thank God there is some prospect of a cessation of the cursed gold seeking for some time owing to the creeks becoming dry. The rascals can’t wash [gold] without water ... It is really ludicrous to see the feeling of indifference (not to say contempt) with which everything appertaining to squatters or squatting is now treated in Melbourne ... They will not always remain under a cloud. The profits of labor will be equalized in time while we have a monopoly of the land which with the help of God we will keep in spite of the Melbourne gold worshippers. Our time will come yet, land will tell in the long run. No one can blame us using any powers circumstances may place within our reach. We are the victims at present, let us hope we shall be the sacrificers by & bye.
- Squatter William Forlonge to C. Barnes (late 1851); W. Forlonge to C. Barnes, 30 December 1851, pp. 3-4, SLV, MS Box 111/5: reported in Peter FitzSimons, Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution (2012), ch. 4, epigraph

[Outsiders] cannot imagine the state of things here. Men who have been servants all their lives are now, after a few weeks work at the diggings, independent.
- Victorian squatter Alfred Burchett (January 1852); Gregory Blake, To Pierce the Tyrant’s Heart (Loftus: Australian Military History Publications, 2009), p. 12

All aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated ... It is not what you were, but what you are that is the criterion.
- John Sherer, an English digger; The Gold-Finder of Australia: How He Went, How He Fared, and How He Made his Fortune (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co., 1853), p. 10

It is every man’s business to take care of himself here. They are just as independent in their speech as in their actions. It is a wonderful place to take the conceit out of men who expect much deference. The Governor was yesterday riding along among this crew, attended by one soldier; but not the slightest notice was taken of him, not even by a touch of the hat. They are just as free in helping themselves to your property.
- William Howitt, describing Melbourne in 1852; Land, Labour, and Gold, or Two Years in Victoria with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1855), p. 25

Her eyebrows neither join nor sever,
But make (as ’tis) that selvage never
Clearly one nor surely two.
- Anacreontea, XVI, 15–17 (Tr. J. M. Edmonds, 1916); cp. Theocritus, VIII, 72

Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde,
Stuck on with Art on either Side,
Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,
Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.
- Jonathan Swift, A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed (1734)

Moe: Listen, Bustoff, you can't drink that! That's alcohol.
Bustoff: No, that's not alcohol. That's just a little tequila, vodka, and cognac.
Curly: Oh, that's different. Go ahead!
- Clyde Bruckman, Grips, Grunts and Groans (1937 The Three Stooges short)

On sleds reclin’d, the furry Russian sits;
And, by his rain-deer drawn, behind him throws
A shining kingdom in a winter’s day.
- James Thomson, Winter (1726)

They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable.
- George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934), Ch. 2

Across the Pathan’s reedy fen,
And the high steeps of Indian snows
Shake to the tread of armèd men.

And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, II, i, Oberon